♦ No official confirmation yet, but media insiders say David Gregory has been tapped to take over as host of Meet the Press. [Politico]
♦ It's rumored Carine Roitfeld is replacing Anna Wintour at Vogue. [Gawker]
♦ A former employee of Charles Kushner is accusing him of funneling cash from his real estate empire to prop up Jared Kushner's Observer. [Daily Intel]
♦ Harvey Weinstein owes Cindy Adams $10,000. [NYP]
♦ Condé Nast has shuttered its social networking site Flip.com. [Gawker]
♦ CBS is producing a new hidden camera show with Ashton Kutcher. [NYT]
♦ Katie Couric has a new haircut, in case you haven't noticed. [HuffPo]
♦ Arianna Huffington's how-to book for aspiring bloggers. [Jossip]
♦ Ever fantasized about having lunch with Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel? You can—for $2,500. [NYO]

Another lawsuit has been filed against pervy American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, alleging he sexually harasses women and inflates his company's profits, as usual. But! AA has now filed its own suit saying that Nikky Yang (the ex-employee who's filed this new suit) is disgruntled and stole money while she was at AA and was always hitting Dov Charney up for money even after she left. (Yang is represented by Keith Fink, the attorney already in an ongoing feud with AA). And AA's suit includes many amusing emails from Yang to Dov, including this one from 2004 promising him a nice hot massage girl!:

With just a little over a month before Fox parts the 200-foot-high bamboo gates of Karaoke Island and unleashes their gargantuan ratings beast upon an eager-to-be-trampled public, the American Idol publicity machine is in full swing.

So bookstores are struggling, editors aren't allowed to acquire new projects or even eat a decent lunch, and it's never been a worse time for aspiring authors with dreams of literary stardom. (Unless they're Jewish comedians or former child-star drug addicts, that is.) But wait! Is it possible that Barack Obama will singlehandedly turn the tide and redeem literary culture? The President-elect was recently photographed with a copy of Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott's Collected Poems, much to the delight of Farrar, Straus and Giroux president Jonathan Galassi, who, after picking up his own poetry prize at the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction Awards last night, said: "Obama is a big reader, and he's an author, so people are paying attention to what he reads. He could have a lot of influence on books and what's read." Indeed. Now, if Michelle could just be seen reading, say, a Joan Didion novel, another angel will get its wings and a few more editorial assistants will still have their jobs come Christmas.

The Hills is about young people. It's about early twentysomethings melting around Los Angeles, sipping clear cocktails and smushing into each other over and over again, like listless boats in a marina. So it's always seriously jarring when someone over the age of 30 pops up, like Heidi's sad, forever lost mother. Or, briefly, bromancer Brody's gin-soaked old lady. And, most unsettlingly, Spencer and Spencerina's grandmoms, who teetered past the screen like an old person at a movie theater last night. It was sad and weird and I'll get to it in a moment. First, though, let's dispatch with the other gloopy matter.

People who use Twitter, a service which posts short updates to the Web and cell phones, love nothing more than to Twitter about themselves, and the medium they've so enthusiastically adopted. If you go by the Twitterers' collective reporting, every event, from an earthquake in Los Angeles to terrorist bombings in Mumbai, is more notable for the fact that people are writing about it on Twitter than for its inherent interest as news. The dominant narrative of Twitter is the rise of Twitter, the latest force to displace the mainstream media and roil the world's information economy. Too bad the real story of the company is one of top-to-bottom incompetence.

Ron Howard, TV's Opie, just directed the film version of Frost/Nixon, because the man knows Oscar-bait when he sees it. And also, sure, because it's politically relevant or something. Howard, the very definition of American Middlebrow, is not a political director, though this year he endorsed Obama because he is a Hollyweird liberal (like his godless pal Andy Griffith). At a recent screening of the film, Howard mentioned how the lessons of Nixon became newly relevant during the Bush administration. Shocking! Good thing Fox News anchor and noted objective journalist Chris Wallace was there to set him straight! Nixon was a crook, see, and Bush is a hero.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, we suppose: Sneak celebrities' medical records to the National Enquirer, collect $4,700 and quietly go back to your day job knowing you helped a venerable journalistic institution uphold its mission of transparency and insight into the fraught conditions of Britney Spears, Farrah Fawcett and others. But that was then, and this — a guilty plea and a possible 10-year prison sentence for tabloid source Lawanda Jackson — is now.

In news that should come as no surprise to anyone who has turned on the TV or opened a newspaper in the past six months, Merriam-Webster has named "bailout" the most popular word of 2008, based on the word's "highest intensity of lookups" over the course of the year. Here's hoping 2009's word is something a little bit more cheerful and not, say, "depression" or "apocalypse." [Reuters]

In what is sure to be the most consequential piece of legal maneuvering since 50 Cent sued Taco Bell last week, idiot Guns n' Roses frontman Axl Rose had his attorney fire off a scathing letter to the Dr. Pepper corporation regarding the company's recent GnR-related marketing mishaps. It promises to be quite a dustup—rock and roll style!!1! Take, heed, soft drink companies: here's what happens when you try to give out a free soda to everyone in America:

You'd think that for an 18-year-old with unlimited financial resources, a foolproof fake ID would be a must. Apparently not. Robby Cohen, the son of airport concession mogul Robert Cohen and the nephew of the late Claudia Cohen (which also makes him the former nephew of billionaire Ron Perelman) headed down to Florida for Thanksgiving weekend where he was busted in Palm Beach on Sunday after the police caught him ordering a rum and coke at the restaurant Nick & Johnny.

Antonio Villaraigosa, the absentee publicity whore mayor of Los Angeles, will not be heading to Washington. Villaraigosa was up on stage behind Barack Obama during last month's introduction of the magic economy-fixing team of advisors, for reasons that were utterly unclear (the man's financial expertise begins and ends with his ability to leverage an ineffective mayoralty into political superstardom). According to Antonio, he totally had a serious conversation with the president-elect about a possible appointment, but (once again according to Antonio) he turned Obama down.

Ford Motor Co. CEO Alan Mulally is a Ford-drivin' man. The humble CEO, who is forced to feed his family on a mere $1/ year salary, announced that rather than taking a private jet like last time, he's going to catch the carpool fever and drive on down to Washington, DC to beg the government for bailout money. Driving himself, in a Ford hybrid car! Has someone been taking our PR advice? We'll say yes! Reportedly, "The Ford road trip would cost about $29, excluding snacks." Cost of snacks: $25 billion. [NYP]

One doesn't think of New Yorkers as particularly gullible or naive, but when it comes to food, we're totally clueless and assume that anything labeled low-fat is automatically low-calorie—at least according to marketing guru Pierre Chandon, who's turned his attention to discovering why Americans, despite being so rich and well-informed, are still such fatties. The Times took his questionnaires out into the field and discovered that "health halos"—ideas about which foods are virtuous based on health campaigns and restaurant advertising—meant that even the know-it-alls in Park Slope embarrassed themselves when it came to guessing calorie content.

Ladies, there's no reason to copy Carrie Bradshaw, who is a fictional character, in everything she does. For example, Page Six reports that bridal designer Gabriella Risatti will knock off 30 copies of the wedding dress that she wore in the Sex and the City movie. Um, hello? That's the dress that she was wearing when Big left her at the altar. (When they got married for real she wore a tasteful suit at City Hall.) The actual Vivienne Westwood dress, which was fairly ridiculous in the first place—that was the point! that the much-vaunted big wedding was hubristic and silly!—does not come avec bird-on-head hairpiece.

Nobody died last night! I don't mean in the world, of course people, too many people, died in the world last night. I mean, more importantly, on Gossip Girl. Two long weeks ago, the "on the next..." clip made it seem like old Barty Crouch Bass would be saying hoof to that bucket and bending it like BeckHamm (the super soccer robot made from parts of David and Mia). And maybe he did, far off in the Chekhovian outlands of unseen action, but we didn't get any confirmation one way or another. Just late-breaking word of "the accident." So, ah well, I guess we'll have to wait til next week. For now, other stuff happened! Come read about it with me, won't you?

Condoleezza Rice played the piano for the Queen of England! Why? Because it's the end of the second term of the Bush administration, and after next month no one will let her do anything fun anymore. The whole "Israel and Palestine peace process" thing kinda fizzled out for our nation's top diplomat so now she's just on a "shit I get to do because I'm still the Secretary of State" tour. Maybe next Sunday she'll call plays for the 49ers! There is a video after the jump.

President-elect Obama—allegedly a 'man of the people'—is allegedly buying a fancy $30,000 ring for his fancy wife, allegedly! It was in the trusty Daily Mail, and now it's the top story on Drudge, meaning it is the single most important news story in all the world. Elitist Obama drops 30K on bling for his wife during a recession—and this bling will be made out of rhodium, the world's most expensive metal! This story is almost certainly bullshit, and we will tell you exactly why. [Updates below—we were right]:

Michelle Williams walking with daughter Matilda ... Uma Thurman arriving at JFK ... Sarah Jessica Parker walking with son James in the West Village ... Naomi Watts carrying her dog and a bunch of bags ... Liev Schreiber rolling luggage down the sidewalk in NoHo ... Anne Hathaway outside the The Daily Show studios ... America Ferrera and Ana Ortiz holding coffee cups on the set of Ugly Betty ... Kim Kardashian shopping on Fifth Avenue and later leaving Citrine on West 21st Street and heading to Marquee.

Because of all the magic innuendo, you guys thought that yesterday's maybe gay young star was Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe. An answer that I rather enjoy. Plus, I've already seen him naked! I didn't write home about it. Today we have an NBA star (that's basketball, fruits) who dressed up as Santa and got his freak on, a little teeny celeb who smokes like a chimney, and another celebrity with a scar story.